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Cash-strapped France scrambles to sell state property

Henry Samuel

1143 Fifth Avenue in New York, which is being sold by the French state. Photo: lesliegarfield.com

Paris: Strapped for cash and struggling to keep its dizzying debt in check, France is scrambling to sell its state-owned property as never before - at home and abroad.

The latest of the French family jewels up for grabs is 1143 Fifth Avenue, New York - a 1500-square-metre, seven-floor red brick and limestone building, housing five apartments as well as a dazzling eight-room duplex - which is on the market for $US32.5 million ($35 million).

Visits began in April but French authorisation for the sale was officially granted only last week in the country's Official Journal, normally meaning negotiations with a likely buyer are in their final stages.

The elegant 1923 building had previously housed diplomatic staff and was part of the French foreign ministry's vast array of prized properties abroad.

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The Quai d'Orsay, as the ministry is known, boasts the third largest foreign diplomatic network in the world after China and the US.

Even more spectacular was the sale in May of the official residence of France's ambassador to the United Nations.

The luxurious 18-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, dubbed "Manhattan's richest apartment building" and once home to Jacqueline Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller, was snapped up for $US70 million by an American financier.

The Quai's profit for the sale was 3500 per cent. But not everyone has gained: France's new ambassador to the UN, Francois Delattre, has failed to find a new home after neighbours blocked him from moving into a 14-room Art Deco flat overlooking the East River, because they were worried about the number of parties he would be throwing.

The drive to sell domestic state-owned properties is also continuing unabated.

France has the highest concentration of state-owned property in Europe - according to government financial statements for 2012, property directly owned by the state is worth €190 billion ($275 billion).

It is seeking to part with almost 1800 properties whose details can be viewed on its dedicated finance ministry website, with almost 400 more in the process of being sold.

Since the France Domaine site first went up in 2010, prized properties up for grabs have included Louis XV's hunting lodge at La Muette in the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris, and a chateau in Thonon-les-Bains, by Lake Geneva in the French Alps, with a "fabulous lakeside location", gardens and private port.

Despite the rich and varied offers, the fire sale to plug French finances has not been helped by a slack housing market.

But at the finance ministry, officials remained sanguine, insisting that it would not bow to pressure to part with prized possessions to fill state coffers unless the conditions were right.

"We are not here to dispose of state heritage at any old price," one told French financial newspaper Les Echos.